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Author: Ron Wood

What do you get when you combine a celebrity boxing champ, a popular DJ and an executive who rents out exotic cars? If images of a lime green Lamborghini and diamond-encrusted platinum bling come to mind, you’re a bit off base, though no one would...

Raymond J. Lucia, who in 2017 challenged the constitutionality of the SEC’s process for appointing administrative law judges (“ALJs”), a challenge the Supreme Court ruled in his favor earlier this year, is back at it. On November 28, 2018, Lucia filed a second case against...

On July 10, 2018, President Trump issued an executive order exempting federal administrative law judges (“ALJs”) from the competitive service, or civil service system. This was in response to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lucia v. SEC, where the court held that SEC ALJs...

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lucia v. SEC hardly came as a surprise. Sure, it invalidated a decades-old process for appointing SEC administrative law judges (“ALJs”), a rare occurrence, the reverberations of which are sure to flow across the federal landscape. But, after the...

After several years and many challenges, the Supreme Court has finally decided that Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) administrative law judges (“ALJs”) are “inferior officers” who exercise significant federal authority and therefore are required by the Appointments Clause of the US constitution to be appointed...

With the startling rise in the value of Bitcoin and the proliferation in the number of crypto- or digital currency initial coin offerings (“ICO’s”) -- more than 160 thus far in 2017 -- government regulators around the world are actively evaluating the risk and utility...

Bitcoin. The very mention of the name conjures the tripartite faces of fear, greed and the unknown. To many it is an unfamiliar economic engine that produces both financial volatility and enormous riches in the Internet’s equivalent of the wild west. But what are the...

The SEC last week abruptly changed its position on the status of its administrative law judges ("ALJs"). In a Supreme Court brief filed in the case of Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC conceded that its ALJs are indeed inferior officers requiring appointment...

Corporate entities that find themselves in litigation after a negative announcement or embarrassing event often conduct internal investigations to get to the root of the problem. Outside law firms, usually not the company’s regular counsel, typically conduct these investigations to ensure objectivity and avoid a...

Numerous recent stories have reported criticism of former FBI Director James Comey’s “leak” of a memorandum summarizing his non-classified conversations with President Donald J. Trump. Critics, mostly in the political world and blogosphere, have decried Comey’s so-called leak as illegal or unethical. Removed from the...